Broadband speed seems a geeky thing to worry about. But if yours is slow it’s as frustrating and unsettling as your tap water dwindling to a trickle.
I’ve just had installed the fastest domestic broadband available outside Japan and Korea, a 50 Mbps (Megabits-per-second) service that is rolling out in the UK as a cable-only offering.
Although, as with every other broadband offering I know of, it never quite achieves its advertised speed, even the 25 to 45 Mbps this cabled service racks up is up to 20 times faster than the wheezing old phone-line broadband I previously had.
(How do I know what speed I’ve been getting? Well, I don’t exactly — measuring broadband speed is a science in itself — but one test site in particular, speedtest.net, comes highly recommended and I think it gets it about right.)
Now I say “wheezing old phone-line broadband”, but it’s only fair to say that the 1-5 Mbps I was getting out of that was something of a miracle, especially since it works on a copper phone wire that may well be 50 years old or more.
For a lot of the world’s population, broadband speeds in that region, even if they’re becoming obsolete in big cities, will continue to be a miracle for many years yet.
In the 1990s, ADSL, the brilliant system by which it’s possible to piggyback broadband on to an existing phone line came, seemingly out of the blue, as a temporary workaround. One minute we were being told that decent broadband speeds would only be possible when the world was rewired with fibre-optic cable; the next minute, broadband, albeit at only 1-5 Mbps, was flowing out of our ancient phone sockets.
I’m reluctant even now to be dismissive of ADSL. I happen to be writing this in a converted barn in an isolated village in south Devon that’s only recently got broadband. It’s only managing under 1 Mbps — but the feeling of connectedness with the ‘outside’ world, compared with previously, when we had only dial-up, is tangible. Imagine how that feeling must be in a village in Africa when it finally gets even a trickle of broadband; the analogy with mains water is not fatuous.
No, 1 Mbps is fast enough for most purposes. The modem I bought (for £188!) in 1992 to send text from my laptop managed 300 ‘bits’ per second. That was enough to send a few pages right around the world in a couple of minutes and such newfangled technology seemed magical. When 9,600 and 14,400 Bps modems arrived in the mid-1990s, we felt we were truly motoring on what Al Gore
had recently called the Information Superhighway.
Comparing different data transmission speeds in different eras is complicated, but it’s valid to say the broadband I just dumped in London (but am thrilled with in Devon) was some 20,000 times faster than I got in 1992. Which makes my new 50 Mbps cable broadband 400,000 times faster on a good day.
So, from London at least, I can now make a lengthy document reappear on the other side of the globe in a millisecond or so and download a music album in about 45 seconds — which I suppose would have taken over four months with the 1992 technology — and, at the 5p a minute calls then cost, £10,000 in phone charges.
Here’s the question, though: I hate to say it, but the second or so that it takes slower web pages to appear with my 50 Mbps connection (quicker websites come up almost instantaneously) is already becoming something of an irritation. Honestly. And it’s not that long since to get a website up took a minute, plus ‘logging on’ with an old screechy modem.
It seems that when it comes to internet speeds, our appetites are insatiable. So when I’m writing in a few years time about the first Gigabit-per-second broadband (already being tested in Japan), will 50 Mbps seem appallingly dozy and archaic? I suppose it will, but it’s hard now to imagine how.
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